Month: November 2017

Since I reviewed the Star Wars Battlefront II beta, much shit has gone down with that game. So I wrote an extensive piece on the events and causes leading up to the troubled release which has supposedly led to EA’s stock value plummeting 3 billion dollars. It’s a long, but quite interesting read, if I do say so myself. Here’s the introduction:

I have been tasked with trying to summarize and discuss the controversy surrounding EA DICE’s most recent game, Star Wars Battlefront II. This is no small feat considering the layers upon layers of incidents that have taken place surrounding this game and EA in general around the same time. I enter this endeavor knowing full well that it is impossible to accurately summarize and address the many parts of the shit sandwich that this game has become. But I will do my best. I think the best way to go about this is to try to piece together some semblance of a timeline and discuss specific points of that timeline and why they were/are significant. Then to conclude with some general thoughts and possible predictions as a result of this mess. Here goes nothing.

You can read the rest right here. Please check out my Author’s Archive for other articles by me on Gaming Rebellion.

As always, thanks for reading. Please take the time to follow my blog, leave a comment, and check out some of my other channels if you enjoyed what you read.

Once again, the day commeth upon us. A day that liveth in infamy. The very speaking of its name strikes fear into the hearts of children and ire into the hearts of men. A day where the strong and diligent are rewarded and the weak and lazy punished. A day of love. A day of hate. I’m talking about Black Friday!

Looking back at Black Friday 2016, I have to say that it was pretty disappointing. I was not able to achieve even half of my gaming deal goals. Here’s what I started with.

A decent list of games overall. A fair haul for any gamer worth his salt. But looking at my post showing what I actually managed to snag, at the prices I wanted of course, I didn’t manage to get much.

A measly 5 games out of 16. That’s super depressing. I remember years where I managed to snag more than 80% of my list for fair prices. Now it’s become terribly impossible to get anything at a good price that isn’t over a year old. Sadly, a lot of publishers have started the intentional practice of releasing their games later in the year so they’re either to close to Black Friday so they don’t have to give a price drop. Often they even wait till after Black Friday has passed so they don’t even have to deal with it. Horizon Zero Dawn Complete Edition is a good example of this with it’s December 5th release date. So now I make my lists and continue to value the games with the same metric I always have, but I’ve accepted that I won’t be able to get nearly as many games as I’d like to until Christmas season or even next year. But let the records show I that I do keep track of these lists forever. To date I now have 11 of those 16 games and have given up on three of them because of lack of interest or lack of supply (glances at Devil’s Third). Some games still haven’t come down to an appropriate price point. Looking at you Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutants in Manhattan. And I’ll most likely be retiring that from the list at the end of this year. But I was diligent for the entire year in my desire to buy it at a fair price.

As it tradition, here is my Black Friday/Holiday Season shopping list for 2017 with my ideal price points. As always, if you see a deal that’s at or below my numbers please take the time to shoot me a link. You can leave a comment here or tweet me @GameChangerDOC. Note that these aren’t necessarily the prices that you’ll see for all these games/products. Again, these are not necessarily prices you will see. They’re prices I’m willing to pay. And I have no illusions about the fact that many of them I won’t see at the prices listed below. I’ve accepted that. As always, I’ve created this easy reference picture for deal hunters on the go.

Just a quick note about Star Wars Battlefront II. It’s on my list because my friend wants to play it, but I honestly don’t care if I never get that game. I am so fed up with EA and their bullshit microtransactions/loot crate models and even just the idea of supporting them in any way puts a bad taste in my mouth. I care so strongly about this issue that I took the time to mention it here in this completely unrelated post.

Thanks for taking the time to help a gamer win his hunt. Much appreciated as always. Happy Black Friday and may the deals be ever in your favor. Also Happy Thanksgiving to my American readers out there.

As always, thanks for reading. Please take the time to follow my blog, leave a comment, and check out some of my other channels if you enjoyed what you read.

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Time for another Gaming Photography Post. Recently I completed Mortal Kombat X on PC.

I have to say that this was a good Mortal Kombat game but I regret buying it for PC. There was content not included in the bundled version of the game on PC that was on console so I lost out because I wasn’t willing to pay extra for fighters like Jason and the Xenomorph. The game ran ok on my GTX 1080 but there were definitely some issues due to the way they ported the game. I actually had to look up how to fix a number of them because this is actually a widespread problem on the PC version that many people struggled with. But all in all it’s a nice looking game with a solid story mode.

So now I’d like to present my top 10 photos from Mortal Kombat X. This is the first AAA game I’ve done a Gaming Photography post for on PC so definitely let me know what you think about the picture quality. As always, I make it a point of only taking natural in game shots. I don’t use photo modes or alter the brightness/color settings except in special situations. I took my photos for this game through Steam‘s screenshot system. I also post them on my Twitter and Instagram often.

I opted to avoid using mostly special attack pics but there are a couple in there.

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*If you’d like to see the full resolution image please right click and press “view image”.

Please let me know what you think of my shots. Any feedback is appreciated because I would like to improve my gaming photography skills.

Today commemorates the fourth anniversary of this blog, which originally started on IGN way back in 2013. So it not only seemed appropriate but necessary to do a post about it. That’s four straight years of never missing a week of posting. No vacation breaks. No missed weeks. No illness breaks. Every week has gotten a post for the last four years.

It has been a good year since I moved from IGN to my own private WordPress. I’m very happy that I made this decision and would never consider returning to that crappy site for hosting. That’s not to imply that IGN is a crappy site in general, but just to comment on the fact that the blogging portion of the site is terrible from a completely technological standpoint. They may have improved since I left, due to technical issues, but I have no interest in going back to find out.

I don’t want to drag this out with an overly long post about future plans and such like I usually do. This year I just want to say thank you for your continued support over the last four years. I’ve really expanded all the things I’ve been doing since I first started blogging about games back in 2013. I’ve written for multiple sites, published more than a hundred game reviews in various places, grown considerably on Twitter, accomplished a lot on my YouTube channel, and various other things including getting a fulltime job because of my blog, attending multiple live gaming events, and meeting many amazing people. And I finally built a gaming PC, just this year.

Thank you to everyone who has been a part of this project in some way, even if it’s just as a reader/viewer of my content.

I plan on continuing this blog and connected channels/accounts and improving my videos and streaming even more than I already have. If you follow me on YouTube then you know that the quality of my content has increased considerably since I built my PC. At the same time, I do have some serious writing projects currently in the works so as I had said in a previous post a few months back, the frequency of posting may drop off a bit. I said this would happen in the aforementioned post but I managed to keep up with weekly posts since then because I wanted to maintain my perfect record for four straight years so I pushed to this bloggiversary. But now I will honestly have to really put a lot more focus on my other writing projects.

I hope that you continue to follow and support my gaming related endeavors in the coming year. I hope to get more comments and engagement and I hope to continue to improve the caliber of content I create.

To end I thought it would nice to quickly show all the games I completed in the last year.

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As always, thanks for reading. Please take the time to follow my blog, leave a comment, and check out some of my other channels if you enjoyed what you read.

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Time for another Gaming Photography Post. Recently I beat a Taiwanese indie game called Detention.

This is an amazing point and click horror story based on historical events. It ties directly to Taiwanese cultural beliefs about ghosts and karma. While it is a 2D point and click, the small studio did a great job of creating a scary atmosphere and a compelling story. I was very impressed with the game overall. Currently it’s actually on sale for Halloween on both Steam and PSN and I highly recommend it. It will only take you 5 – 6 hours tops, which is why you’ll want to grab it at sale price. I played the Steam version.

So now I’d like to present my top 10 photos from Detention. As always, I make it a point of only taking natural in game shots. I don’t use photo modes or alter the brightness/color settings except in special situations. I took my photos for this game through Steam‘s screenshot system. I also post them on my Twitter and Instagram often.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

*If you’d like to see the full resolution image please right click and press “view image”.

Please let me know what you think of my shots. Any feedback is appreciated because I would like to improve my gaming photography skills.

As always, thanks for reading. Please take the time to follow my blog, leave a comment, and check out some of my other channels if you enjoyed what you read.